Don't cry for me, CNN

Over the last few days, millions of Americans have watched the situation in Japan jump from tragedy to tragedy, helplessly observing the destruction in shock and horror. Except for those of us who have been watching it on CNN, in which case we’ve watched in shock and horror as Anderson Cooper desperately tries to get people to cry on camera, while in the background something happens in Japan.

I’m not trying to make light of what is an absolutely heartbreaking situation in Japan, but I am trying to make light of the way cable news tries to cover it.

I wound up watching the coverage on CNN after flipping past MSNBC, where Rachel Maddow tried to blame the ongoing tragedy in Japan on Karl Rove, and FOX News, where a panel of attractive people in suits tried to blame the ongoing tragedy on Rachel Maddow.

I’m intelligent enough to know that this whole thing is actually the fault of angry rock monsters living just below the earth’s crust, so I settled on CNN.

From jump street, CNN had Anderson “the living haircut” Cooper, Dr. Sanjay “why did they send me here” Gupta and Soledad “Conan” O’Brien on the scene, sifting through the aftermath of the tsunami and stopping whoever they could find to sob their brains out for the cameras. Now the beauty of this approach is that when you do live news, eventually something is going to happen to make you look like a total jackass. It took CNN about two hours.

At one point, CNN had been running a photo of an American guy who had been over in Japan when the earthquake hit, with the promise that they were desperately searching for him on behalf of his family, who were no doubt heartbroken and just moments away from turning on the tears, which Anderson Cooper uses to irrigate his organic patchouli patch.

After running the same graphic of the guy for the first few hours of their coverage, Soledad finally found him in a makeshift bunker he’d built to avoid being interviewed by CNN. Despite his protests, they dragged him out and shoved a camera in his face, when the most amazing television moment in history happened. Live to the world, they had this guy talk to his dad.

If you’ve ever heard a father and a son talk, you know that these exchanges generally treat “feelings” like landmines. Staying on the high ground (baseball statistics, the state of their respective lawns, where they get haircuts) keeps the conversation in a safe place. If a father and son do ever reveal the true bond and deep affection they share, they would do it preferably in the cold vacuum of space right as one of them seals the hatches and launches the other one to safety before heroically blowing up the asteroid, saving the planet and dying a fiery death. As you can imagine, this has only happened once (in a Bruce Willis movie) but again these are ideal conditions. Note that even under those ideal conditions of soul-baring emotion, neither one is permitted to cry. But apparently no one told that to CNN, who were really counting on this guy to lay down some waterworks for his dad.

Instead, if you were to condense every awkward, emotion-phobic conversation between a father and a son and concentrate it down to thirty seconds, it would mirror the following transcript from the CNN interview verbatim:

SOLEDAD: We’re now live with your family, who are no doubt so relieved to see you safe after all this. Do you have anything to say to them?

SOLEDAD: (scrunches up face as if trying to will the guy into crying through use of the Force)

SILENCE

MORE SILENCE

SOLEDAD: Anything else you…

DAD: I see you have my hat.

GUY: Oh… huh (points to hat). Yup.

I swear to God, every word of this exchange actually happened on live television broadcast out to millions. CNN spent half their airtime searching for this guy so that his family could confirm that not only was he “pretty good,” but that the family hat had not been lost in the tragedy.

Again, I’m not trying to make light of the devastation. I’m just saying that in troubling times such as these, it’s comforting in some way to know that the world keeps turning (thanks to the rock monsters), fathers and sons keep avoiding emotional conversations and cable news is still your best source for unintentional comedy.

To help the people of Japan, text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 toward relief efforts.

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